On Jan 10, 2006, at 2:02 AM, Ralf Stephan wrote:
But this makes sense. I don't want a locale, I just want to switch to a different application language, of which I happen to know that it's installed. I fail to see that anything is wrong with the behaviour of my system, and it does what I want.
Ahhh... but there's the problem.
This is the post-DOS era. Most developers count on the OS doing at least some of the heavy lifting. And most users who want an app to run in a different language want it to actually be functional. Usually that means counting on the OS or standard libs to do their fair share, and not re-implementing that in the application code. In turn, most who've implemented it have cleaned things up to work for many different languages. So when an applications wants to do things in a particular language, they make a standard call and count on the system to handle things for them.
In turn, these system libraries have often broken things down to be data-driven and/or extendible at runtime. They often then collect up the bits needed to run in a certain way and call that a 'locale'.
I certainly don't want to system-wide install the de locale just to have a peek at the German inkscape translation.
Then you can't count on anything working. Though there is a very minimal subset of things that might work, getting an application to "come up in a certain language" usually needs support from the OS and underlying libs. Collation is one of the first things that poses a problem. If any sort of list is to be presented as part of a UI, programs *should* be doing things properly, which in turn most often requires a given language be configured.
Now, if the only thing you want is to peek at the translations, there are quite a few tools out there to do so (Inkscape uses standard things for that), and you can run any of those. On the other hand, if you want the application to actually come up using a specific language for its user interface, then you're at the point of needing to have proper support installed or just live with things being half broken.
Remember, at a minimum you need the OS and Libs to have fonts installed that have the glyphs needed for the target language. And then the OS and libs need to be able to access those glyphs (not always an easy thing even just a few years ago). Luckily, if the language is German and your normal language is English, then you probably have most German glyphs installed already. But if you wanted to look at Japanese, it just wouldn't work. Unfortunately, though fonts themselves have now become easy to install user-side, "language" support itself has not, as most who have need of seeing things in a different language also usually have need of also being able to list things and work on them, and thus begrudge them a tiny directory or .NLS file.